PolicyCast

Ricardo Hausmann, the founder and director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab, is helping developing countries around the globe create capacity to model the coronavirus pandemic and develop economic and epidemiological responses. The Growth Lab COVID-19 Task Force explores the macroeconomic and fiscal implications of the pandemic and offers strategic guidance on policy decisions for collaborating nations including Albania, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Namibia, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. For more about this effort, Growth Lab COVID-19 Task Force, please visit the Growth Lab COVID-19 Task Force home page.Under Hausmann’s leadership, the Growth Lab, which is based in the Center for International Development, has grown into one of the world’s most well regarded and influential hubs for research on international development. Hausmann has served as principal investigator for more than 50 research initiatives in nearly 30 countries and is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School.

First there was the shock of realizing that the COVID-19 pandemic would be widespread and lengthy. Now issues of race, equity, and the coronavirus are quickly coming to the fore, as data pours in showing how the virus is hitting minority communities the hardest.Harvard Kennedy School Professor Cornell Brooks says historic systemic discrimination, lack of access to healthcare and healthy food, housing and employment disparities, and other issues have left communities of color uniquely vulnerable.Discrimination means people in communities of color can’t follow many recommended individual actions for the pandemic including staying at home, working from home, stocking up on groceries, drive-through testing, and social distancing. Low-income “essential” workers, he says, have effectively become human buffers against the coronavirus for people with higher incomes.There are also moral implications to unequal distribution of risk, including the spread of COVID-19 in prisons and in jails where people accused of crimes are waiting to be tried. A pandemic spreading in these “petri dish” situations means exposing potentially-innocent people to what amounts to a death sentence,  he says, not to mention the exposure facing correctional officers and staff.Brooks also says the pandemic is also causing widespread disruption in the current election season, and that it has the potential to exacerbate the current trend toward minority disenfranchisement, both purposeful and unanticipated. He says the recent election debacle in Wisconsin, where more than 90% of polling places in some cities were closed and voters were forced to break social distancing in order to participate in the democratic process, was a warning to the country about how the pandemic endangers both democracy and lives.“We are ill-prepared for November,” he says. “It's not enough for us to say we are in the midst of a pandemic and we can only concern ourselves with face masks and ventilators. We also have to be concerned about ballot boxes and polling places.”After the pandemic is over and life starts returning to normal, Brooks says American will need to learn from the experience and make long-overdue societal shifts to keep the impact of events like this from being so severe and unevenly distributed the next time.Cornell Brooks is the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and  Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice.  is also Director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School’s Center for Public LeadershipPolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean for Communications and Public Affairs Thoko Moyo. It is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Visit the Building State Capability program's  “Public Leadership Through Crisis” blog.All PolicyCast episodes are now being recorded remotely. This episode was recorded on March 27, 2020 using SquadCast.

Responding to a threatening virus is nothing new to HKS Senior Lecturer Juliette Kayyem, who played a major role in managing the US response to the H1N1 virus pandemic in 2009 as an official in the Obama administration.But now as the COVID-19 coronavirus has spread from Asia to Europe and the Middle East and threatens to reach pandemic status, Kayyem says globalization and other factors have changed the nature of crises humanity is facing—and that governments and crisis managers need to adapt.“The nature of the crises we’re facing on a global scale is that they are very hard to limit,” she says. “They're very hard to contain and their impact is going to be felt across borders, across geographies, and across chain of commands.”Kayyem tells PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo that there is already a well-established playbook for responding to a local, regional, or even a global crisis. But planning ahead for a so-called “black swan” event—the kind of low-probability, high-consequence crisis that has the potential to change the course of history—is often complicated by wildcards such as irrational fears, misinformation and disinformation, and politics.  In the world of disaster preparedness and response, she says, measuring success sometimes means being happy that things could have been worse.“It's not rainbows and unicorns,” she says. “In my world, you're already at the bad thing happening. And if you're lucky, maybe you can stop it.”Juliette Kayyem is the Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at Harvard Kennedy School, a security consultant, entrepreneur, and the author of the book “Security Mom: My Life Protecting the Home and Homeland.”

Democratic governance expert Archon Fung says that since 2016 we have entered a political dramatically different from the previous 35 years. He calls it a period of “wide aperture, low deference Democracy.” In simplest terms, it’s an era when a much wider range of ideas and potential policies are being debated and when traditional leaders in politics, media, academia, and culture are increasingly being questioned, pushed aside, and ignored by a distrustful public.And he says the fate of those leaders and elites is significantly of their own making, because they have supported self-interested policies that have resulted in the largest levels of economic inequality since the Gilded Age and a government that is responsive to the wealthy but not to ordinary citizens. “The growing of the pie has not been even at all,” Professor Fung tells PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo. “And that causes some significant dissatisfaction in the institutions that are supposed to govern.”Professor Fung says it’s too early to say whether this era marks our democracy’s demise in favor of authoritarianism, its rebirth as something better, or a state of purgatory where things stay in this “crazy, anxious state for a while.” Some first steps toward avoiding that fate and creating what he calls a “deeper democracy,” he says, include popular mobilization and steps to “create experts and leaders we can really believe in and find trustworthy.”Professor Fung is based at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and his research explores policies, practices, and institutions that help make democracy work better.PolicyCast is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes

The New York Times called it one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said the international community "lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis” at the recent UN Climate Summit in Madrid.But Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Stavins says global climate negotiators still accomplished something important last month at the COP25 conference—because of what they didn't do. Instead of approving lax rules full of loopholes that big polluting countries like Brazil and Australia were, negotiators held the line and pushed off a decision until next year's meeting in Scotland.Stavins, the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development and director of both the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements and the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, tells host Thoko Moyo that getting workable economic solutions in place to combat the climate crisis is essential, because fundamentally the crisis was caused by economic activity. Stavins says his latest research shows that both carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes can work, as long as they are well-designed.For more on Professor Stavins' thoughts on the COP25 summit and his research, check out his blog: An Economic View of the Environment. PolicyCast is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.

Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor of Public Policy Benjamin Schneer says the drawing of electoral districts is a complex and partisan process that often results in politicians picking their voters instead of the other way around. But it doesn't have to be that way. Schneer's work explores political representation, elections, and ways to mitigate forces that distort the ability of citizens to communicate their desires to government. His recent research has focused on redistricting, the political process of redrawing state legislative and Congressional districts every 10 years following a Census (the next one will take place in 2020). Schneer says the recent work by an independent redistricting commission in Arizona has shown that it is possible to make fair and competitive legislative districts without the Gerrymandering that can distort legislative democracy. But the fact that the Arizona process ended up being litigated in from of the US Supreme Court—twice—shows that the debate is heated and ongoing. Schneer says his current project is working on systems that will allow for fairer results even in states where independent redistricting commissions aren’t politically feasible.

A short decade from now, Africa will have the youngest workforce in an aging world and the potential to become a spectacular economic success story. Or it could become home to the overwhelming majority of the world’s poor. “By 2030 or so, we'll probably need to create about 11 million jobs a year,” says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, one of the world's leading development economists. “That’s a tall order.” But not an impossible one, says Okonjo-Iweala, a former managing director of the World Bank and Finance Minister of Nigeria. While the window for Africa to become a job-creating manufacturing powerhouse like the so-called “Asian Tiger” countries, she says there is still the potential that “smokestack-less” industries such as services and technology that are booming in countries like Rwanda could help create an economic African Lion. Okonjo-Iweala says African policymakers must learn the lessons of the continent’s most recent boom in order to ensure a prosperous future. For the first 15 years of the 21st century, African economies as a group grew annually by four to six percent, at times outpacing the average global growth rate. African policymakers helped through better macroeconomic management of things like exchange rates, inflation, and negotiating down the continents huge debt burden. But falling commodity prices over the past several years expose a weakness in that success, stalling growth, and now African policymakers must push further to support entrepreneurs by investing in infrastructure and education and cutting the bureaucratic red tape that can stifle innovation. Okonjo-Iweala spoke with PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo after a recent visit to Harvard Kennedy School to deliver the Robert S. McNamara Lecture on War and Peace. For more on this topic, check out Okonjo-Iweala’s lecture, which sponsored by the Institute of Politics and titled “The Changing Face of Povery: Can Africa Surprise the World?”

Activists from around the world reach out to Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth on an almost daily basis. And they mostly ask the same question: How can we fight authoritarianism — and the often-brutal repression that comes with it — without resorting to violence ourselves? They turn to her because her groundbreaking research has shown that, when done the right way, nonviolent civil resistance is actually more effective at driving political change than taking up arms. Chenoweth is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of the forthcoming book: “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know.” To read more about Professor Chenoweth and her work, check out the latest issue of Harvard Kennedy School Magazine. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/advocacy-social-movements/paths-resistance-erica-chenoweths-research

Harvard Kennedy School Professor David Deming, whose research focuses on the economics of education, recently wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Tuition-free College Could Cost Less Than You Think.” Making college education widely affordable in the U.S. is vital, Deming says, because a degree will likely be a prerequisite for the labor market of the not-too-distant future. Professor Deming recently sat down with PolicyCast host Thoko Moyo to discuss not just how to lower college costs, but also how to improve educational quality and what that could mean for students across the socioeconomic spectrum. In addition to being a professor at HKS and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Deming is also the new faculty director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at HKS and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He recently won the David Kershaw Prize, which is given to scholars under the age of 40 who have made distinguished contribution to the field of public policy and management. To learn more about the Malcolm Wiener Center, please visit: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/wiener PolicyCast is hosted by Harvard Kennedy School Associate Dean of Communications Thoko Moyo. The show is produced by Ralph Ranalli and Susan Hughes.